Ken Campbell

Actor, writer and director whose surrealist, experimental one-man shows won him a devoted following

Campbell also appeared on the big screen, but almost always in relatively small rolesPhoto: Richard Watt

9:09PM BST 01 Sep 2008

Ken Campbell , who died on Sunday aged 66, was an actor, writer and director of wilful eccentricity, whose work in experimental theatre embraced such diverse projects as hammering a nail into his nose, a 12-hour ("with intervals – they loved the intervals") adaptation of Robert Anton Wilson's conspiracy theory novel Illuminatus! and a translation of Macbeth into the pidgin English of Vanuatu, the South Seas island whose inhabitants worship the Duke of Edinburgh.

Perhaps his finest hour came when he issued a spoof press release in the aftermath of the Royal Shakespeare Company's success with Trevor Nunn's adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, declaring that the company would henceforth be known as the Royal Dickens Company. This missive (signed "love, Trev") convinced a surprising number of journalists, and enraged Nunn so much that he brought in the police to investigate.

Kenneth Victor Campbell was born on December 10 1941 at Ilford, Essex, the son of a telegrapher, Anthony Campbell, and his wife Elsie (née Handley) and educated at Chigwell School.

He staged his first performances in the bathroom of his childhood home. "I was three years old and helped by my invisible friend, Peter Jelp, I put on shows for the characters in the linoleum." Recollections of a Furtive Nudist, the first of his Bald Trilogy (so-called because the playwright David Hare had a trilogy running at the National Theatre), "completed the bathroom cycle", he told critics in 1991.

After school, Campbell directed Bournemouth Aqua shows for 1964 and 1965 before progressing to Rada. He then played a tramp in an old overcoat in a nine-month touring production of Frank Norman and Lionel Bart's Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be and joined Colchester Rep as an understudy to Warren Mitchell.

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Campbell, reluctant to waste the overcoat – which he had hung on to after the end of the run – had begun writing sketches in which it was instrumental.

His first play, Events of an Average Bath Night, was directed by Mitchell, but received little attention. The second, however, a children's comedy inspired by the Beano and entitled Old King Cole (Leeds Playhouse, 1970), in which Campbell played the title role, was better received.

He was taken up by the film director Lindsay Anderson and spent some time as a junior director at the Royal Court in London.

In the early 1970s, inspired by a performance of the American Living Theatre at the Roundhouse in north London, he set up The Ken Campbell Roadshow, which launched the careers of Bob Hoskins and Percy James Kent Smith (who changed his name to Sylvester McCoy). The latter's pseudonym came from a show in 1971 in which McCoy was billed as the "Human Bomb". The shows were a mixture of surrealism, shaggy dog stories and ferrets stuffed down trousers.

By the mid-1970s, Campbell had written half a dozen short plays, of which the most notable was The Great Caper (1974). When Richard Eyre, an admirer of Campbell's, took control of the Nottingham Playhouse, he commissioned Bendigo (1974), about a prizefighter, and, the following year, Walking Like Geoffrey.

Campbell also had a fair degree of experience as a director, not only at the Royal Court (with Inside Out, 1969) and Remember the Truth Dentist (Upstairs, 1974) but with the Octagon theatre of Bolton, which finally jibbed at his increasingly eccentric productions, describing them as "an outrage".

In 1976 Campbell founded the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, for which he wrote, with Chris Langham, Illuminatus!, the first production staged at the National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium. Three years later he followed it with an even longer and madder production, The Warp, which he wrote in conjunction with Neil Oram. It lasted 22 hours, consisted of 10 plays, and explored "alternative consciousness" by examining fire-eating and UFOs. Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent were in the cast.

He adapted The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy for its first stage production in 1979. Science fiction was an abiding interest, and he made several attempts to translate Philip K Dick's novel Valis to the stage.

Campbell's other interests, which ranged from Buckminster Fuller to trepanning, time-travel, troglodytes, lavatorial jokes and the possibility that Sir Clive Sinclair's C5 vehicle might unwittingly unleash God upon the world, were knitted into a series of performances as he became best known as a performer of surrealist one-man shows.

The National Theatre's Bald Trilogy (comprising Reflections of a Furtive Nudist, Pigspurt and Jamais Vu) won widespread praise, and an Evening Standard Comedy Award in 1993. In 1996 he returned to the National with Violin Time and three years later presented his version of Macbeth in pidgin (memorably describing the Duke of Edinburgh as "numbawan bigfella him blong missus queen") there.

In 1994 he stepped into the breach at the Almeida in north London when the run of a Ben Travers farce ended sooner than expected. His monologue, Mystery Bruises was, declared The Daily Telegraph's Charles Spencer, "more heroically demented than ever".

In 2000 Campbell presented the History of Comedy Part One: Ventriloquism at the National. In 2005 he received good notices for I'm Not Mad, I've Just Read Different Books.

He was a regular fixture at the Edinburgh Festival, where he had been performing three days before his unexpected death.

He occasionally appeared on television, notably as a dodgy lawyer in Law and Order, in an episode of Fawlty Towers and as Alf Garnett's neighbour in In Sickness and in Health. He was also Krauss in Private Schultz and Oscar Dean in Brookside, and presented several series on popular science, including Reality on the Rocks and Six Experiments That Changed the World, during which he interviewed Stephen Hawking (characteristically, he wondered whether the software on Hawking's voice synthesiser allowed for a button which would tell interviewers to "F--- off").

Campbell also appeared on the big screen, but almost always in relatively small roles. The exceptions were Derek Jarman's version of The Tempest (1979), Peter Greenaway's film A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Campbell's memorable role as Bartlett in A Fish Called Wanda (1988).

Ken Campbell kept three dogs and was devoted to an African grey parrot which he had bought when his daughter gave him some money to buy a computer. There had been a pet shop next door to the computer showroom. He was, for a time, professor of ventriloquism at Rada.

He married, in 1978, the actress Prunella Gee. They subsequently divorced, but remained on good terms. She and their daughter survive him.